By Nick Grabbe
Private Thayer Greene had just turned 19 when he entered the city of Nordhausen as his regiment’s lead scout. It was 11th April 1945. He had already experienced the terror of enemy soldiers shooting at him, and on this day he would witness the horror of mass murder.
He expected to get machine-gunned at any moment. As he carefully entered the city, he saw a man coming toward him in a uniform he didn’t recognize. He raised his rifle, but lowered it after seeing no weapon. The man, a walking skeleton, approached, fell to his knees and kissed Greene’s feet. “Freiheit! Freiheit! Freiheit!” he cried. That’s German for “Freedom!”
Greene had stumbled on the site of a concentration camp that had been abandoned by German soldiers as the Allies advanced. At the time, American soldiers knew nothing about the camps that the Nazis had created all over Europe. When he died in 2022 at the age of 95, Thayer Greene was one of the last living liberators of concentration camps. When his fellow soldiers entered the camp at Nordhausen in central Germany, they encountered an estimated 1,300 bodies of prisoners who had been shot or starved to death…
Close Encounters in War 
Nick Grabbe’s article regarding the life of Thayer Greene was moving and compelling. I too am a combat veteran. There were no concentration camps liberated in Vietnam but there were stories of torture and the Hanoi Hilton.
America’s overreach was Agent Orange. What a horrible method of destruction. I witnessed my buddies and other Americans and many Vietnamese getting sick and eventually dying of exposure. It is also regrettable that the manufacturer and sellers of Agent Orange were never held accountable.
My life was transformed by war. I graduated from a University with a degree in Business. After war, and its many injustices, I sought to become a teacher. My method of teaching reached its highest purpose when I taught ethics within the Business School of a major University. I retitled the course “What does it mean to live well.” It is my view that combat soldiers have walked in the shadow of death and they know evil. I felt that it was my duty to shed light on injustices and to disrupt evil when it spread itself in civilian life.
Thank you for these stories. CEIW brings truth out.
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